History of Nails – Which Nails To Use?

Nails may have been used in Mesopotamia as early as 3500 B.C. and were probably made of copper or bronze. Later, iron was used to make nails.

Early nails were shaped, or forged, with hammers. With the development of the split wood shingle, nails of about 1" long came into use. When sawyers, and then sawmills, began cutting dimension lumber, the sizes and varieties of nails greatly expanded. Thus, over time, nails developed in different sizes, shapes (most common were rosehead), and used different heads to fasten lumber and wood.

The first nails had the benefit of four sharp edges on the shank which cut deep into timber and the tapered shank provided friction down its full length. The wood fibres would often swell if damp and bind round the nail making an extremely strong fixing.

As early as the late 17th century, rolling mills turned out long, thin, square pieces of iron called nail stock to be sent to the local nailer. He then heated a section of the stock and pounded out a point on all four sides.

Until the late 18th century, every nail had to be individually forged from a square rod by a blacksmith. "Wrought nails" were so expensive that houses were still mostly assembled with wooden pegs, and old building were often burned down just so their nails could be used again.

Between the 1790s and the early 1800s, various machines were invented for making nails from bars of iron. The earliest machines chopped nails off the iron bar like a guillotine, wiggling the bar from side to side with every stroke to produce a tapered shank.

Cut nails are made in a two-step process. First, blanks are cut from flat strips of iron. Second, the nail is held tight while the head is formed by the blow of a mechanical heading device.

It's interesting to know that Thomas Jefferson (author of the Declaration of Independence) added a nailmaking operation to his blacksmith shop in 1794. Up to fourteen young male slaves, aged ten to twenty-one, worked at the forges of the nailery. From 1794 to 1796, when he was retired, Jefferson calculated the efficiency of the nailers, each day weighing their nailrod and the nails they produced.

Cut nails had dominated the market from about 1820 (development of the Type B nail) to 1910, the advent of the wire nail.

Wire nails have all but replaced the cut nail. Hand forged nails are still used but mainly as restoration nails. Though wire nails are cheaper to produce, the cut nail has a holding power of approximately four times to its modern, round cousin.

You can find traditional hand forged rosehead nails on Handforged Ironmongery site.